GameMaker Help having the player smoothly holster weapon - 2d sidescroll

[BeansMyth]

Hi, i have searched everywhere for insight about this, but I'm lost.

Here is what I want:

The player should be able to take their gun out with a certain key and aim it around.

I think i would need to change the sprite then to an armless version and then draw on some move-able arms so they can aim. And then they would put the gun away, and I would undraw the external arms and set the sprite index back to the armed ones.

Is this the...good way of doing it? The style I'm going for is sort of a non-pixel and smooth animation look. I don't want arms just disappearing if the player stops aiming.

Not sure if I explained my idea in the best way, but i feel like theres probably a better way to do it. My project doesnt have more than maybe three weapons, one being melee.

 

[curato]

best way is to have separate sprites and layer them works especially well in a top down view. You just have to mash them together in the draw even then you can change out which arm sprite to use pretty easy.

 

[NeoShade]

The way you've descibed your idea, you would end up with three sprites:

• character_with_arms
• character_without_arms
• arms

With this system, whenever the character draws or holsters their weapon, you need to do two things:

• change the base character sprite to/from the armless version
• begin drawing a second sprite containing only arms

An alternative (but similar method) would be to have these three sprites:

• character_without_arms
• arms_with_weapon
• arms_without_weapon

Now, whenever your character draws or holsters their weapon, do the following:

• change which arms sprite is being drawn

Because you're always going to be drawing two sprites instead of one, there might be a small performance hit, but it would be very minimal.



With either method, there are pros and cons. I just thought it might be worth mentioning this alternative.